Gabriel G Tabarani*
By any conventional diplomatic measure, the meetings between Lebanese and Israeli delegations under American auspices should be described as historic. Three rounds of talks in Washington. Lebanese representatives sitting across from Israelis inside the State Department. American mediation promising ceasefires, border stabilization, reconstruction, and perhaps eventually normalization.
Yet this is not truly a negotiation about peace.
It is a negotiation about authorship: Who gets to write the Lebanese state into existence after decades of fragmentation?
This distinction matters because modern Lebanon no longer suffers primarily from occupation, militia proliferation, or economic collapse—grave as those crises are. Its deepest crisis is that nobody fully believes the Lebanese state actually possesses sovereign agency anymore, including many of its own citizens.
And that is what makes the current negotiations fundamentally different from previous Arab-Israeli diplomacy.
Egypt negotiated from the position of a state reclaiming occupied territory. Jordan negotiated from the position of a monarchy securing strategic continuity. The Palestinians negotiate for recognition of statehood.
Lebanon, however, is negotiating while the very definition of the state remains unresolved.
The irony is painful. The more Lebanese officials attempt to prove they are “responsible partners” for Washington and Western capitals, the more they expose how little autonomous leverage they actually possess. Every diplomatic concession appears externally sponsored. Every military calculation depends on foreign restraint. Every ceasefire is linked to negotiations happening elsewhere—especially between Washington and Tehran.
The result is the emergence of something unprecedented in the modern Middle East: a franchise state.
Lebanon increasingly resembles a political entity where sovereignty is subcontracted among external and internal actors simultaneously. The United States guarantees diplomacy. Iran guarantees deterrence. Israel dictates military escalation thresholds. Gulf states guarantee financial survival. Hezbollah guarantees parallel coercive authority. The Lebanese government administers the symbolism of sovereignty without monopolizing its substance.
This explains the strange atmosphere surrounding the current talks.
Officially, the negotiations concern borders, ceasefires, and Hezbollah’s disarmament. But beneath the procedural language lies a much larger struggle over legitimacy itself. Washington appears to believe that integrating Lebanon into a regional security architecture aligned with Israel and moderate Arab states can gradually restore state authority. Hezbollah believes the opposite: that the Lebanese state can survive only if resistance remains intact as a deterrent against Israeli domination.
Both sides are therefore fighting to become the internationally accepted translator of Lebanese interests.
The danger is that Lebanon’s leadership may misunderstand the nature of the American project. Washington does not necessarily seek a strong Lebanese state in the classical sense. Strong states are difficult clients. What Washington seeks is predictability: a Lebanese authority capable of managing escalation, containing Hezbollah, and securing the northern Israeli frontier without collapsing internally.
These are not identical objectives.
Historically, Lebanon has repeatedly mistaken external sponsorship for state-building. The French Mandate created institutions without national cohesion. The Taif Agreement ended the civil war but redistributed sectarian power instead of transcending it. Syrian tutelage imposed stability while hollowing sovereignty. International donor conferences preserved financial liquidity while institutional corruption metastasized underneath.
Now a new model is emerging: outsourced stabilization.
Under this model, Lebanon does not become fully sovereign. It becomes sustainably manageable.
That may sound cynical, but it is increasingly visible in the structure of negotiations themselves. The Lebanese delegation cannot fully commit because domestic consensus does not exist. Hezbollah cannot fully escalate because Iran’s regional calculations constrain it. Israel cannot fully invade because Washington seeks regional de-escalation while negotiating with Tehran. America cannot fully impose a settlement because it lacks local legitimacy.
Everyone around the table is simultaneously powerful and constrained.
This creates a diplomatic theater where all participants speak about peace while preparing for the probability that peace will fail.
And yet there remains one overlooked possibility—perhaps the only genuinely new opportunity hidden inside this dangerous moment.
For decades, Lebanese politics operated through sectarian balance. Today, exhaustion may be producing something more important than balance: mutual recognition of limits.
Hezbollah now knows military superiority cannot produce national legitimacy. Its opponents know international backing cannot erase Hezbollah socially or politically. Gulf capitals know financial leverage alone cannot reconstruct Lebanon. Western governments know institutional reform cannot occur while the country remains trapped inside unresolved regional wars.
This shared exhaustion could eventually produce a different kind of Lebanese social contract—not one based on victory, but on collective inability to dominate.
That would represent a radical break from Lebanon’s modern history.
The current negotiations may therefore matter less for whether they produce peace with Israel than for whether they force Lebanese factions to confront a deeper truth: no foreign power can permanently govern Lebanon’s contradictions on its behalf.
Not Iran.
Not America.
Not Saudi Arabia.
Not France.
Not even Hezbollah itself.
The central question is no longer whether Lebanon will normalize relations with Israel. The real question is whether Lebanon can normalize relations with itself.
Because states do not disappear only when armies invade them. Sometimes they disappear when every major decision requires external arbitration.
Lebanon has reached that threshold.
The tragedy is that many Lebanese leaders still behave as though the negotiations are about borders and weapons, while the real negotiation is over whether the Lebanese state remains an actor in history—or merely the geography where other actors negotiate.
That is why these talks feel simultaneously historic and hollow.
They may produce ceasefires.
They may produce security arrangements.
They may even produce diplomatic breakthroughs.
But unless Lebanon rebuilds internal legitimacy independent of foreign sponsorship, every agreement will remain temporary.
A country cannot subcontract sovereignty forever without eventually forgetting how to exercise it.
This article was originally published in Arabic on the Asswak Al-Arab website
